Overview

MBV Systèmes d’Information (MBV SI) is a fast-growing systems integrator based in France. Set up by experienced managers from industry sectors where high-availability computing is critical, MBV SI aims to provide extremely reliable business services to its clients. The company prides itself on offering tailored solutions that adapt to its clients’ changing requirements.

The Challenge

Technology plays an increasingly important role in practically every business today. The explosive growth of web, mobile and social technologies is driving faster cycles of change, requiring businesses to become more agile and responsive. For businesses facing competition from smaller, more nimble start-ups, there is significant untapped value in putting enterprise data to better use.

Thierry Martin, Commercial Director of MBV SI, said: “Our clients recognize that their vast stores of ERP data are a source of deep intelligence that can help them steer their businesses. By analysing that data in new ways and in real time, they can identify commercial opportunities and threats much faster and respond more appropriately. For clients using SAP ERP, there is also an interest in trying out new cloudbased systems and interfaces alongside their existing on-premises infrastructure.”

MBV SI saw a clear opportunity to help its clients on both fronts by launching a hosted SAP HANA offering that would enable them to create cloud-based environments for high-speed analysis.

SUSE Solution

MBV SI worked with Dell Global Services to deploy four SAP HANA appliances based on Dell PowerEdge R920 servers, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as the operating system.

“We knew that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is SAP’s own development platform for Linux, and that the two companies have a close testing and development relationship,” said Thierry Martin. “We also knew that the SUSE OS is currently used in more than 5,800 SAP HANA installations worldwide, so we were confident that it was the right choice.”

Given MBV SI’s focus on enterprise-class services, the integration of the SAP Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications was another attractive feature. Deploying similar capabilities in the other leading Linux distribution would have required MBV SI to license an additional three products, increasing the complexity and the cost.

MBV SI uses a kernel-tune option in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to optimize performance for its SAP HANA workloads. As standard, the Linux kernel swaps out rarely accessed application memory pages and uses them as a cache to accelerate file system operations. The kernel-tune option ensures that when the page-cache is filled to the configured limit, application memory takes priority and does not get paged out in this way-keeping it available for SAP applications.

“Deploying SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was easy, and the support is great from all three parties: Dell, SUSE and SAP,” said Thierry Martin. “We plan to deploy SUSE Manager in the near future to help us manage our whole SUSE Linux Enterprise Server landscape more efficiently and effectively.”

The Results

“With SAP HANA, our clients can answer business questions that were simply impossible to answer before,” said Thierry Martin. “They are free to explore the potential of SAP HANA without thinking about the underlying infrastructure. In this respect, MBV SI is like the ‘electricity’ for the solution: we provide a high-performance platform on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, enabling them to focus purely on the SAP application itself.”

A major area of interest for MBV SI’s clients is using SAP HANA to accelerate the SAP Business Planning Consolidation application. This solution helps clients streamline financial planning, budgeting and forecasting and provides what if analysis and scenario planning to help them make better decisions in real time.

“To support real-time decision making in SAP HANA, our clients need complete confidence that the platform will always be running optimally,” said Thierry Martin. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers the required enterprise-level reliability, availability, scalability, manageability and security. High availability is a cornerstone of our commercial offer: clients know that they can trust us to keep their systems running at all times.”